I don’t remember her, and I didn’t miss her. Not then. He was enough.
Until the day I came home from school and found him sitting in his chair, just sitting there with his eyes open staring at Jeopardy! on the TV, the kettle boiled dry on the stove so that the house smelled like hot metal and a choking haze hung in the air.
At first, all I did was play the violin. Wouldn’t talk. Wouldn’t eat. The kids at the first home I lived in made fun of me, snatching my bow away, dancing around and chanting, “Morgan can’t talk! Morgan can’t talk!” until my foster mom made them stop. Let them say whatever the fuck they want, I thought. I heard him speaking to me through the music. That’s all I cared about.
I was there for three years. My social worker found a way to put me in music lessons, and every week I went to the music center to study with a fat nun who always wore the same sweat-stained black dress and smelled of licorice. She made me play Mozart when all I wanted to play were his songs. “You have a gift,” she said, the sweat stains spreading larger and darker as her frustration with me grew. “You have a responsibility to learn! You must practice and concentrate!”
But the violin seems to like his songs best. They live in the wood and the hollow spaces and echo in my heart. When it became too painful to remember, though, I just stopped playing. At some point, I found my own voice again. Turns out it usually got me into trouble. Once I started high school, I was moved to another home, to parents who took in older kids. Just temporary, they said, until they could find a family for me. I knew better. I knew how the system worked. There wasn’t a family out there for me. A few years later, I landed here, at Laurie and Bill’s. Just temporary. I get it.
I think of the old woman from Boreal Retirement Home. The way she sat in that chair. Her white hair and weathered skin. And those eyes. Those eyes that can’t see, yet somehow made me feel like she was looking right through me. Something in those eyes makes me want to remember.
The door swings open, and the light flicks on.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, shithead! Some of us have to get up in a few hours. Sounds like you’re killing cats in here! For god’s sakes, shut the fuck up or I’ll break the fucking thing!”
It’s Caleb. He wouldn’t know good music if it hit him in the face.
“Fuck you!” I pick up my hairbrush and throw it, missing him and knocking over the lamp on my dresser. He gives me the finger before slamming the door.
“Asshole.”
The spell is broken. I shove the violin back in its case and close the lid, snapping shut the clasps. My eyes are stinging.
The door opens again, and I’m about to really freak out at Caleb when I realize it’s Laurie. She just stands there, in the doorway, wrapping her blue housecoat around her, tightening the belt, fussing with it, like somehow it will hold her together.
“They told me you could play,” she says.
I look at the violin’s beat-up case before shoving it under the bed. It’s my past, but it’s not my present. And I see no place for it in my future. I don’t answer her. I don’t say anything.
“It’s beautiful,” she says. “The music . . . it’s really beautiful.”
The silence stretches between us, but I can still hear the song, echoing about the room. It feels like forever before she finally says good night and turns out the light, quietly shutting the door behind her.
I’ve forgotten to put the pictures away. I climb into bed carefully, so I don’t disturb them, and I lie beneath them. They cover me like a quilt.
*
Marty looks at me, dripping puddles that collect around Caleb’s work boots on the tile floor. “Too wet to paint today.”
No shit.
I’ve brought my violin with me. I’ve been bringing it everywhere now; I don’t trust that little piece of shit Caleb to keep his hands off it. Marty points at the shelf and tells me to put my stuff there and then hands me a floor mop, one of those big ones that’s used for dusting. “Run this up and down the hallways. Once we’ve swept, we’ll give it a wash.”
In the few days I’ve been at Boreal Retirement Home, I haven’t spent much time inside. It’s not like what I thought it would be, not like a hospital or institution. I guess that’s what it’s like for old people who have money for the best of everything. It’s laid out in a Y shape with the main entrance and a sitting area in the stem. On one side are offices including the one for Anne Campbell, RN, Executive Director. The other side has a dining area, and I can hear the sounds of a kitchen. Marty’s office is down a little hallway near the kitchen, close to all the mechanical workings like the boiler and the air-conditioning system. I was down the left arm of the Y when I pushed the old woman back to her room in her wheelchair a few days ago. That’s where all the old people live who can mostly take care of themselves but get help with meals and cleaning and shit. At the very end of the hallway is another sitting area with big windows that face the courtyard.
But the other arm of the Y is different. The entrance is locked, like the main doors, and Marty gives me the keypad code. Inside, there’s a counter, where nurses work, and the doors to the rooms are open. They’re still nice, but I can tell this is where the old people live who need more help. Locked in. Prison.
I enter the code to the other wing, begin at the far sunroom and work my way toward the tile hallway, pushing my line of dirt as I go. The sounds start when I’m about halfway down the hall, reaching through the noise of my headphones and making the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I pull out my earbuds. The rolling thunder and pounding rain are confusing, but then I hear it again. It’s wordless, and haunting, like the cry of a frightened animal, cornered and desperate and heartbreaking. I’ve heard it before, years ago, coming from a small dark-haired girl kneeling at the foot of an old chair, the kettle boiled dry and the voice of Alex Trebek and Jeopardy! in the background.
I watch as the halls come alive with bodies in pink and orange scrubs darting from the nurses’ desk and scurrying through a closed door into one of the rooms. I should keep sweeping, but I can’t move. I’m invisible, standing here, as aides and nurses scatter and regroup. Finally the cry subsides, and the rain is the only sound remaining.
It’s a few more minutes before I resume mopping. The hallway returns to normal, but I leave my headphones around my neck, the music faintly audible. I swivel the mop and head back toward the nurses’ desk. As I pass the door where all the activity had been, an aide opens the door and I can’t help looking in. I recognize the long white hair of the old woman and look away quickly before she turns toward me. I focus on the mop, the line of dust, the music. But I can feel her. I can feel her standing there. I can feel her watching me. I know she can’t see. But if I didn’t know better, I’d swear Elizabeth Livingstone was looking right through me.
I’m invisible except to the one person who is blind.